Gabriella Pinto

(19**-) Stage-manager and playwright. Began her theatrical career in her parent’s living room in the 1990s by forcing family members to belt out renditions of Spice Girl songs to choreographed dance moves. She did 11 years of part-time training at The Waterfront Theatre School in speech and drama, ballet, modern and tap dancing. In 2011 she graduated from UCT with a BA in Theatre and Performance where she was awarded the Mavis Taylor Award for theatre-making and the Ruth Peffers Prize for most promising student. She performed in various student productions , her most recent being VII (2011) directed by Thenjiwe Stemela and Outside In (2011) directed by Laen Herschler. In 2012 she stage-managed Jon Keevy's Owl on its national tour and she and Iman Isaacs founded a professional company with friends calles The Poor Artists Collective. Her first attempt at directing and writing was a play called Eden, which was professionally done by the company at the Grahamstown Festival (NAF in 2012. Her next playtext, Chickens, was the first winner of the SCriBE Writers' Competition in 2012, and was professionally performed by Magnet Theatre in the same year.